


Diary of a Terran Soldier

by themocaw



Category: Galactic Civilizations 2
Genre: Gen, Science Fiction, Soldiers, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 03:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 21,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themocaw/pseuds/themocaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Originally posted to the Stardock Forums here: http://forums.galciv2.com/156972 . Revised and reposted to AO3 for posterity<br/>-----<br/>A planetary invasion in Galactic Civilizations 2 involves billions of soldiers. What does one of these invasions look like from the perspective of one of those nameless men?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**February 14, 2229**  
 **Somewhere in Hyperspace**  
  
So this is my first journal entry, and the only reason I've  started keeping one is because Jenkins had one too many beers and got philosophical.  
  
See, we were sitting in mess hall 7117 after training, kicking back and having a couple of beers, and we started reflecting on just how great the ol' "Valley Forge" is. Biggest troop transport in its class, powerful as hell and faster than shit on skates. Anyway, Jenkins started talking about how the really awesome thing about the Forge isn't how powerful it is, but how robust it is. Sure, most of the one billion troops it carries are sleeping peacefully in cryo, but there are still about fifty million troops still awake and training, like me and Jenkins. Feeding and caring for that literal city of people isn't any small task.  
  
That number got him even more philosophical. 1 billion. A few hundred years ago, that many people was the entire human population in existence. Now we send that many soldiers to far-off worlds to go fight aliens. About half of them get to see home again. So that's five hundred million soldiers dead just like that. The entire population of humanity circa 1300 CE.

Jenkins, being a complete jerk when he gets philosophical, started ranting about how our lives have no meaning in the big picture: we're just casualty number four million six hundred fifty thousand and ninety, not Jimmy Jenkins from Aldebaran. Like a true asshole, he passed out and left me behind to shoulder the weight of his philosophy, and so I figured I may as well try and leave something for posterity behind to prove that Steve Lee of Proxima 7 was more than just a number. More than just another nameless soldier fighting and dying far from home. So here it is, my journal.

Where to start. . . well. My parents were doctors, and we emigrated from Earth to Proxima 7 beacause Earth was getting too crowded and expensive, and we wanted a fresh start. Proxima was where I grew up: it was where I learned to drive, where I had my first kiss and other things that followed, and where the Yor decided to start their invasion.  
  
They hit us without warning: their automated heavy fighters shot down our piddly little Defenders before we knew what was happening. The next day, their troop transports started dropping hunter-killers from orbit. Two billion people died in the next four days, including Doctors Crystal and Derek Lee. I, on the other hand, survived the invasion of killer robots, was recruited into the resistance, handed a laser rifle and told to shoot it at anything that didn't have skin. Never fired it once: Earth sent in the cavalry first, and I became yet another refugee fleeing the front lines of the Second Interstellar War.  
  
Funny thing is, it wasn't my parents dying that made me join up. It was running away from that fight on that refugee ship. Something about that feeling of being totally helpless and running for your life that I didn't like. Decided I was going to go ahead and take my destiny in my own hands, something like that. Better to be able to shoot back than have to run all the time. I enlisted the moment the refugee ship touched ground.  
  
Boot camp was eight weeks of hell crammed into six: I can't remember a time when I wasn't cold, hungry, tired, or all three. But soon enough, I'd gone from "This is a plasma rifle, there are many like it but this one is mine," to "I solemnly swear to defend the Terran Alliance and all its interests from all threats domestic and foreign." A couple of hours later, I was on the Valley Forge headed to the front lines.  
  
As "training cadre," we weren't put into cryo, but put into rigorous training: they can do a lot with cryo-hypno, but there are things you have to learn for yourself. I learned how to be a Combat Anti-armor and Tactical Support driver: flivver pilot. If you don't know what we do: take a hovercar, armor it up, and attach a big gun to the top. We're nowhere near as tough as a real tank, but we're faster, smaller, we have better range, and we're more expendable. The last part is what makes us nervous, and why we get called "eggshells with sledgehammers."  
  
Anyway, Jenkins is waking up, and he'll be totally insufferable when he's hung over, so I'll stop there. Will talk about more when there's more to say.  
  
Ciao


	2. Chapter 2

**February 17, 2229**  
 **Location Classified**  
  
I sometimes wish my damn flivver would break down already. The thing's already on its way out: the antigrav is close to shot, and the microfusion reactor hiccups every time I rev it up into combat mode. The thing is, the military doesn't like to retire equipment until it's truly dead, and so I can't get a replacement until the thing breaks down. I'm tempted to throw a wrench into the goddamn transmission stream and kill it entirely, but if I get caught, that's six days in the brig eating nutriloaf and cold water for destroying government property, so what can I do? Hopefully, it breaks down before we drop, or I'll be spending the next deployment wondering whether or not I'll wind up behind enemy lines with a broken flivver and Yor all around me. . . that would be a bad thing, in case you were wondering.  
  
We crossed into the Yor anti-interdiction field three hours ago. Officially, we're not supposed to know where we are for "operational security purposes," but it was pretty obvious when the drives started revving to 200% normal output (the whine of the ion engines gets pretty loud in the mess hall) and the stars still barely moved. We're not sure how it works, or how it's generated, but the net effect is to prevent any ship that uses hyperdrive from travelling faster than a couple of parsecs per week. The damn Yor, of course, can still move as fast as they like, which makes it very annoying to be a Terran in Yor territory.  
  
It's good to have an escort, although it would be good if we had more than a couple of Victory-Class cruisers on our wings: they were state-of-the-art three years ago, but in the world of modern military combat, that's a lifetime. True, the Victory is smaller and faster than the Nebula-class battleship, but that speed doesn't help when you're in a Yor interdiction field. There's apparently an effort underway to retrofit Victory-Class ships with heavier armor and remove the surplus drive units. I dunno. I'm just a grunt, not a starship engineer.  
  
Anyway, here's an example of how bored we get on ship heading into action: Freeman came up with a new game called Smoke Grenade Ferret Legging. The way it works is, you take a half-dozen of the golf-ball sized grenades, pull the pins, and shove them down your pants. No skivvies. You gotta have your pants bloused into your boots and your fly up. When the smoke grenade goes off, it spews colored smoke all over the place and starts spinning around like a freaking whirly-bug. Not to mention the smoke is cold as hell because it's actually some kinda weird chemical fog. Whoever gives up first loses. Freeman's record is six minutes. No one else lasts more than thirty seconds.  
  
It's better than last week, when we were assigned to handle an infestation of rats that somehow developed on the ship. Ask a civvie to do that, he'd lay down poison, set some traps, get a cat. Terran Marines aren't that smart, and at least three times as bored, so instead we went hunting rats with plasma rifles set to 10% power. That's not enough to blast through the hull and kill us all, and honestly, it's usually not enough to kill the rat outright. Usually just knocks them on their ass and sets their fur on fire, and then they run around squealing bloody murder and stuff while people laugh at their suffering and slow death. I got sick of it after one day: roast rat smells like shit, and honestly, it didn't feel good torturing living creatures like that. Some of the guys are still at it, though.  
  
Sometimes feel like some of my fellow troopers belong on the other side of the war: Vecchio's done shit that would make a goddamn Drengin turn . . . greener. . . with nausea (and those fucking apes eat their enemies). You go to war with what you've got, not what you'd like to have, I guess. Jenkins put it best: "The fate of humanity rests in the hands of 18-year old kids with the maturity of third graders."  
  
Eight weeks out. Dunno how much longer we'll be here. Getting antsy, I'm sick of waiting, I wanna get off this damn ship.


	3. Chapter 3

**February 20, 2229**  
  
Might as well tell you a bit about my crew.  
  
CATs flivvers have three-man crews: a driver, a commander, and an engineer. The driver is usually the low man on the totem pole because he doesn't get to shoot back: that's me, by the way, as the FNG. My job is to make sure the flivver goes where it's supposed to go and doesn't flip over. That's bad, by the way: anti-grav craft have a tendency to do that, especially in a high wind, and the hover-field generators are fragile, so ninety percent of my job is making sure we don't run over a sharp steel wall, tear out the hover pads and send us crashing to ground. The other ten percent is actually driving the damn thing to where it needs to go.  
  
Our engineer is the aforementioned Private Jenkins, he of the sardonic wit and absolutely no tact whatsoever. Jenkins' job is making my job and the commander's job easier: he runs the radio, loads the big gun, operates the sensors, and fires the small gun: the point-defense laser turret mounted on the front of our flivver. He rides shotgun and carries a shotgun too: 8 gauge semi-automatic fletchette gun with integral inertial dampers. Meat grinder, perfect for tearing rampaging Drengin berserkers to shreds.  
  
It doesn't work so great against armored Yor Hunter-Killers, but I digress.  
  
Our commander is Corporal Josh Higgins, a down-home guy from Missouri who looks about twelve years old but has already served a campaign against the Drengin. Earned some medal when he helped drag his lieutenant to safety while Drengin berserkers charged him carrying big machetes and dinner forks. Killed an unknown number of green apes with his rifle, then his handgun, and finally ended up taking down the last guy with a big rock. If he takes off his shirt, you can see a souvenir of that last fight: a big-ass scar running all the way down his chest and halfway down one thigh, courtesy of a Drengin boma blade.  
  
Supposedly, personal armor has improved since then, but I still wouldn't trust it with my life if I didn't have to. We're technically mechanized cavalry, so we don't get powered suits like the infantry: ballistic armor and chicken-plate flak jackets only, with standard Mark IV helmets and sensor visors. Corporal Higgins is issued a plasma rifle as his long-arm, the only one who gets a full-scale infantry weapon, and he also gets to shoot the big gun: turret-mounted 60mm recoilless rifle with coaxial laser. Jenkins carries the shotgun I mentioned. Me? I'm stuck with the pea-shooter. 3mm gauss carbine. It makes a nice pew pew pew sound, that's about it.  
  
We all carry laser pistols as our sidearms, and a varying assortment of grenades, most of which we keep in the glove box. The back of our flivver usually carries about two weeks' worth of food and water, some repair kits, ammo for the big gun, and some extra fuel cells for our reactor.   
  
And that's about it: three guys, one hovercar, and a shitload of aliens.  
  
We drop in three days. My flivver still hasn't broken down yet. Freeman is trying to get people to start up a tontine: kind of a dead pool. You put five bucks in the pool, and if you're still alive after the campaign, you get a share of the money. Not getting too many takers, though. Guess that's the sort of thing that people just don't like to think about. Dying, and stuff.

That's me. Mister Eloquence.


	4. Chapter 4

**February 22, 2229**

The other troops woke up out of cryo today. They were greeted with the news that we'd just lost our escort cruisers.

Lentz used to be home to a small civilization called the Lentzlandians, guys who looked a lot like the Monopoly mascot and talked a lot like Jeeves. The Yor took them over a couple of years ago, and now there's nothing but Yor cities, Yor factories, and Yor themselves walking along the ruins of those quaint little houses. Also, Yor Heavy Fighters in orbit around their world. Which goes back to the whole "Lost our escort cruisers" problem.

TATT Valley Forge is a big ship, but it's not very heavily armored: the price we pay for building a ship that's capable of carrying a billion troops into battle at any kind of reasonable speed is that there's not much weight left for armor. For that reason, our escorts, TAS Bonhomme Richard and TAS Merrimack, went ahead to clear the planet's orbit of threats.

They did a fairly decent job: Yor ships are normally armed with mass drivers, and their defensive philosophy consists of armoring up their ships with heavy plating. Armor plating doesn't do so great against Terran missiles, though: a good Armor-Piercing warhead punches through Tri-Strontium like it's paper. But the thing is, Yor ships don't really rely on that armor. They prefer numbers. And they had more numbers than our escorts had missiles.

The Richard died first: the first fighter they took on got off a lucky shot that blasted the bridge clean off the ship, and the second hulled her with a shot to the reactor while her crew was scrambling to recover from losing their entire top tier of command. TAS Merrimack managed to take down the rest of the fighter screen, but she got mauled in the process: barely at 10% hull integrity, life support failing, weapons offline. Her only hope is to get to drydock and effect full repairs, but the closest Terran starport is a good month away through hostile territory.

Thankfully, there's one that's even closer. Only problem is, it's a Yor starport, the one on Lentz.

So tomorrow, we're going to drop down onto a planet filled with hostile sentient robots that want to kill us all and try to capture the enemy starport intact so that our escort ship can effect repairs and try to defend us from the Yor fleet that is sure to come by trying to recapture their lost planet. Eventually.

I can't wait.

Oh yeah, and my flivver still hasn't broken down yet. Joy.


	5. Chapter 5

**February 23, 2229**   
**Lentz I**

I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive.

I'm goddamn alive.

Shit. . . I'm alive.

Damn damn damn damn damn. . . shit. . . goddamn. . .

Christ. . .

***End of Journal Entry***


	6. Chapter 6

**February 24, 2229 6 pm**   
**Lentz I**

Military has an acronym, FUBAR. It stands for "Fouled" Up Beyond All Recognition. It's used for those situations that are screwed up in a militarily efficient and thorough manner. Your flivver breaking down is not FUBAR. FUBAR is your flivver breaking down two hundred yards above ground on terminal approach. FUBAR is a major getting lost and leading a light infantry regiment smack into a column of mechanized cavalry backed up by artillery. FUBAR is a general coming up to you ten minutes before the drop and telling you all the plans have changed.

"Spy satellites detected a strange structure from orbit," General Warren said. "Intel reports the enemy calls it a Hyperion Shrinker. We're not sure what it does, but we know we want it in one piece. For that reason, we're going in clean." Clean means no mass driver bombardment beforehand: enemy defenses will be live going in. Heavier casualties, less damage to infrastructure.

Second problem: someone heard about this and decided that us poor CATs drivers could use some extra protection, so they uparmored all our drop-pods: that means attaching extra armor plating to the underside of the protective shell around our hovercars. They didn't tell us they were doing that, or we'd have told them they were insane. Marine flivvers don't have hypercharged repulsors. We can't take the extra weight.

We fell in like rocks. Jenkins managed to keep us alive by cutting away the pod early, with re-entry heat still around us. The hoverpads took the friction, but it wrecked them entirely. We came in on the side of a hill, slid down a couple of hundred feet, thrown around like rocks in a tin can, and finally stopped three hundred yards from a pair of Yor Drones gathering rocks or something.

Yor don't have soldiers, they reconfigure their Drones from Worker to Hunter-Killer mode for combat. That saved us: we shot them as they were switching their plasma cutters to plasma rifle mode. But it made a lot of noise, and a lot of smoke, and then we could hear other Yor yelling in that weird beeping language of theirs.

We turned and ran for it, grabbed what supplies we could from the flivver and booked it towards the falling stars that were the other Terran dropships. As we did, we could see dozens of red spheres rising up to meet them: Yor singularity launchers shooting down our dropships. There was a lot of falling burning metal and meat, like some kinda devil rain. "This way!" Higgins shouted, and he pulled us into a building and that's when he got his head taken off by a Hunter-Killer's cutting shears.

Jenkins gave it two blasts from his shotgun but there's only so much fletchettes will do against an eight-foot tall, three-hundred pound industrial machine turned mek. He knocked it back on its ass though, got us outside and then we saw three more of the things pop up out of nowhere.

Jimmy whirled around, tried to get his gun pointed at them, and then the one in the front swung some kinda whip and took his hand off at the wrist. The cut was as clean as a knife through sushi, so clean it took a moment to start gushing blood. Jenkins dropped to the ground screaming and grabbing his arm, and I went for my peashooter, but then the HK swung that whip at me again, just cracked it in the air in front of my face, and I put my hands up. The one in the lead turned to the other two HK's and made some buzzing noise. "SEARCH FOR OTHERS. I WILL TAKE THESE TWO FOR INTERROGATION AND DISSECTION," my universal translator said.

At that moment, I kinda wished I'd turned it off.

*****

We were led to a building, some kind of warehouse or factory, where there were a couple of dozen other Terran Marines like me, sitting around and looking scared. A lot of them, like Jenkins, were missing body parts. A bunch of others had plasma burns on some part of their bodies. I managed to tie off Jenkins' arm with my belt, make a makeshift tourniquet. He didn't look good, he was real pale and clammy, and his breathing was getting erratic. Going into shock from loss of blood.

Then the interrogations started.

The Yor method of interrogation is simple. They line up six guys. They ask a question. If no one answers, or they don't get an answer they like, they kill a random guy, usually by dissecting him while alive. Slowly. Then they grab a replacement and ask again. They keep going until they get an answer they like or they run out of prisoners.

They seemed really interested in something called the Teer Kwan. They kept asking that over and over. "Where is the Teer Kwan? Where is the Teer Kwan?" No one knew the answer, they kept asking and asking, and people kept dying and dying, and then we were about ankle-deep in blood, and there was this loud commotion outside, and then things started blowing up.

The lights went out first, and then the Yor who'd been doing most of the torturing got its head blown off by a plasma blast. I heard some glass breaking, and someone yelling "GET DOWN" and then things went absolutely nuts.

Okay, here is the thing, a plasma pistol is basically a really shitty weapon. Plasma weapons are too heavy for personal use, really, even rifles are big and heavy. Plasma pistols are practically unusable: too heavy, too slow, and even if they pack a punch you're better off using lasers, or something else with less recoil. You definitely don't shoot one one-handed, and there's no way in hell you can carry one in each hand and shoot both while diving through a diamond-glass window.

This little guy obviously didn't get the memo, because he was doing just that.

He was dressed in some kind of weird black ninja outfit that seemed to soak up all the light that fell on it, turning him into some kind of moving shadow. He had a plasma pistol in each hand and was shooting wildly in every direction, but each shot hit a Yor, knocked it back or down if it didn't kill it outright. One of them tried to swing that cutting whip at him, and he actually backflipped over the wire and (I kid you not)pulled out a sword and sliced its head clean off.

Then the door opened up, and the biggest guy I'd ever seen marched in carrying a goddamn heavy repeater that looked torn off of a flivver. "Down!" shouted the little guy, and he kicked me to the ground, dropped to his knees in some sort of weird cat-stance. The big guy opened up and started blasting the entire room with plasma fire. Boom boom boom boom boom, sky turns white hot, Yor start shooting back, but they just can't seem to hit him. It's over in under a minute, just a bunch of dead Yor, the gory remains of the hostages, and two blood-spattered ninjas from hell standing in the middle of a charnel house.

"Out," the little guy said to us. "They've got our location now. We need to move, before reinforcements arrive."

I turned to grab Jenkins, but he was dead already. There was a hole the size of a softball in his chest from a plasma bolt. Hit during the crossfire. He looked kind of disappointed, as if he'd been expecting better. "See, that's what you get," his expression seemed to say. "Look at me. Just another dead guy in a pointless war."

I felt a hand on my shoulder. "We need to go," the little guy was saying. "Now."

I gestured helplessly at my dead friend. "He didn't want to be just another dead soldier," I said lamely.

The little guy seemed to understand, somehow. "Six," he said. The big guy nodded, hefted Jenkins' body over his shoulder, and started carrying him out of the warehouse. "Now, move," the little guy said. He pushed a laser pistol into my hand. "Don't shoot until I say too. We're going to move fast and quiet. Stick to cover, don't be a hero, just stay low and run like heck. Go."

We went. Outside, the war was continuing. There was plasma fire flying in every direction: mostly towards us, but the ones that were heading away seemed to hit a Yor with every shot. There were two more ninjas hiding behind cover firing plasma rifles at the approaching enemy. "Out?" one of them asked.

"Out," the little guy confirmed. "Get the prisoners to safety. We'll continue the mission. Sovek Yad Chia."

"Yad Chia Kalia, first," the rifleman replied. He nodded to his friend, and the two of them ran off towards the other prisoners, started waving them to safety.

"Let's go," the little guy said.

"Wait!" I'd seen something in the courtyard that I knew how to use. "Hang on, let's take this."

There was blood on the front seat of the hover-truck, and the driver's side door was gone, but the engine still worked, and the hoverpads were operational.

"Good idea. Head west, towards the open prarie," the little guy said. "Six."

"On it." Six (if that was the big guy's name), laid Jenkins gently down on the truck bed and set up his big gun on the truck's tailgate. "Ready."

"Drive," the little guy said, climbing into the front passenger's seat. He rolled down the window and started shooting back at the pursuing Yor, as I put the truck into gear and started driving like a bat out of hell. Six laid down a lot of cover fire in the meantime, fast and wild, but weirdly accurate, boom boom boom boom boom.

We burst out of the city and onto the open grasslands, our truck skimming the grass like some sort of dragonfly or insect. "West," the little guy said, pulling back the hood of his ninja suit. "There are marshlands there."

"Woah woah woah, you want to go into a swamp! We won't last more than an hour with the water mucking up the hoverpads!" I protested.

"It'll be an hour during which we'll be going three times faster than the enemy. Hunter Killers don't handle wet or uneven ground well, and the treeline will protect us from aircraft. We'll ditch the truck and go on foot afterwards."

"Wait, you want to slog our way on foot through a swamp!? You're CRAZY--"

That's when I realized I'd been making an unjustified assumption the whole time.

She wasn't a very pretty girl, what with the huge burn scar running down the side of her face from her forehead to her chin, but she was definitely a girl. Now that I could get a closer look at her body up close, when she wasn't leaping around like some kind of monkey, I could see. . . well, let's just say I could see enough.

"Are you going to look at the road or at me?" she asked challengingly. "Just drive."

"Yes, ma'am," I whispered, thunderstruck. "Ummm. . . do you have a name?"

"No name, no need. Call me One," she said curtly, pulling the hair tie from her high ponytail and letting her chin-length hair fall free.

"One. Gotcha." I gulped and stared straight ahead at where we were going. It seemed the safest thing to do for several reasons.


	7. Chapter 7

**February 25, 2229**   
**Somewhere in a goddamn swamp on a backwater planet in the armpit of the galaxy.**

Hovertruck broke down at last this morning. One whole night and most of a morning driving through swamps, and the hover pads finally overloaded and shorted out. We buried Jenkins the best we could: laid him in the front seat and pushed the truck into the swamp. Wish we could do more for him, but Graves Registration will just have to pick him up later after we capture the planet.

Whenever that is. I'm thinking it might never happen.

The Lentz Campaign is. . . not going well, to say the least, from what I can see. Dropships have stopped falling, but the sky's thick with Yor Flitters: Hunter-Killers reconfigured with antigrav units. Air cover. They've got air superiority, we're stuck on the ground with them.

It wouldn't be so bad if I weren't stuck on the ground with the Yor and a couple of absolute weirdo ninja-soldiers. Six is bad enough: he's ridiculously huge, and he doesn't say anything worth writing down, but he's at least human. One, I'm not even sure of that. The girl doesn't walk so much as lope or stalk, and I've never seen anyone sit so still in my entire life for so long. Sometimes I don't think she even breathes.

Example: the swamp has these leeches. They're big and slimy and they've got these rainbow colors all over them that would be pretty if they weren't latching onto you and sucking your blood. First time I saw one of them latched onto my arm I freaked out and started tugging on it. "Don't," she said, grabbing my wrist. "It'll break apart. Cause infection."

"Shit, then what do I do?"

"Nothing. There aren't enough to cause you permanent harm, and they'll fall off once they've had enough to drink."

"What if it gets infected?"

"It won't. They secrete an antibiotic." And that was that. No ewww squick, just "oh well."

The weirdest part, though, is when they talk to each other. They don't speak Standard English from what I can hear, it sounds more like Chinese or German crossed with one of those clicky African languages and whistling. That's right, whistling.

"Sora Yan Thath," Six will say.

"Yali," One will reply.

"Sor," Six will say.

"What was that?" I'll ask.

"Six says that there are seventeen Yor Flitters up ahead and we should head towards the east to avoid them. I suggested we go northwest instead, and he suggested we take it slow and quiet."

I'm not sure if they're bullshitting me or if that's really what they're saying.

At one point, I heard Six mention something like, "Sei Teer Kwan," and my ears perked up like a fox's.

"Teer Kwan, what the heck is a Teer Kwan?" I asked.

That brought them both to a halt. "What do you know about Teer Kwan?" One asked, and I couldn't help notice how her hand was getting closer to her holstered plasma pistol.

"Nothing," I said slowly and calmly, "It's just the Yor kept asking about it. Where is the Teer Kwan, what is the Teer Kwan, what do you know about it. Considering that they kept asking about it and killed a bunch of us to try and find out more, I thought it might be a little important, maybe."

"It's nothing," One said, taking her hand off her pistol. "I've never heard of such a thing."

Yeah, pull the other one, it's got bells on it. "You're a lousy liar," I said flatly. "And considering I've just been through absolute hell these past twenty four hours, I think I deserve an explanation."

Six pulled out a big freakin' knife and pointed it at my throat. "We tell you, we have to kill you," he said bluntly.

"All right, then I'll tell you," I said. "You know what I think? I think it's got something to do with you two weirdoes, and how One here can dodge bullets and shoot a gun in each hand while diving through an open window and get headshots each time. I think it's got something to do with how Six can pick up a crew-served heavy repeater and pick it up like a toothpick, and make every shot hit while firing full-auto. I think the Yor found out something about that and they want it for themselves and that's why they dissected ten of my fellow marines to try and find out more about it. Am I close?"

Stupid of me. Six clocked me on the side of the head with the hilt of his knife and stabbed the big pig-sticker down at me. I saw One kick his wrist and knock the knife out of his hand: it landed, point down, an inch from the side of my head. The two of them started jabbering in that weird language of theirs. Six was obviously pissed and kept making throat-cutting gestures in my general direction, but One was obviously more pissed and kept snapping one phrase back at him over and over "Sovek Yad Chia. Sovek Yad Chia."

Finally, Six backed down and went into parade rest. "Yad Chia Kalia," he said, and walked off into the swamp looking mad and annoyed.

"What did you tell him?" I asked. My hand wouldn't stop shaking, and I had a feeling I'd need a change of underwear.

"What he needed to hear," One said cryptically. "Come on, let's take a walk."

*****

"What do you know about the Arceans?" One asked, as we walked on through the swamp.

"Big, green guys. Got crazy dreadlocks. They're a 'proud warrior race,' which I think translates to 'assholes.'"

"Not completely inaccurate," One said flatly. "Go on,"

"They're also getting their asses handed to them by the Yor. Totally stampeded. Word is they've lost all their colony worlds, they're reduced to space nomads now."

"It was because they were the first race to recognize the Yor as a threat, after the Iconians were wiped out," One explained. "By that time, however, it was too late for them. The Yor fleet was simply too powerful, and the Yor themselves were too numerous. Apparently, the Yor homeworld contains several Precursor ruins, including manufacturing sites, which gives them an incredible edge in the field of starship production. Arcean ships were better, and they killed Yor ships of similar size and class three-to-one. But the Yor could build five ships for every Arcean ship.

"The Arceans, being a 'proud warrior race,' as you said, came to a conclusion that their own destruction would not be in vain if the seeds of future Yor downfall could be planted in the short time they had remaining," One went on. "Their scientists shifted their focus to a plan of action that could destroy the Yor, even if the Arceans themselves could not put it into action. What they came up with was in a way, simplicity itself.

"The Yor, despite all their sophistication, are machines," One explained, "and as machines they suffer from several exploitable flaws. The first is that their method of decision-making is analytical. Humans don't work that way. A ball-player doesn't calculate out the trajectory of a baseball and its estimated speed and course of action in his head. He just runs out there and catches the ball. Pattern Recognition, adjusted for the current situation. Less accurate, but faster, and it has the advantage that it can be quickly adjusted and recalibrated for situations that have not been encountered. A Yor needs to rewrite its decision tree and establish a new parameter. They can do it fast, but it usually needs a split second to integrate and optimize that new parameter, and we can exploit that time delay in the meanwhile.

"Secondly, the Yor don't form individual attachments." One brushed a lock of hair back from her face, fingering the burn scar on her forehead. "To the Yor, one Yor is the same as any other, designated only by their serial number. N-1. X-17. Just one of billions. A Yor does not fight to defend its own existence or the existence of its companions, only to complete the mission."

"This means that Yor ground combat tactics are, in a sense, completely brute-force," One concluded. "They don't value the lives of their soldiers, and they don't anticipate change well. So they will continue to use the mass assault combat tactic: throwing billions of Hunter-Killers into a battle and winning in a war of attrition."

"I don't see how they're much different from us in that regard," I muttered, thinking of Jenkins.

"Then you should be dead right now. The Yor don't rescue prisoners," One said bluntly.

"Whatever. . . look, this still doesn't explain why you and Six have magic powers."

"I'm getting there," One said. "With this realization, the Arceans understood that the Yor could be defeated by taking advantage of the two characteristics biological life has that mechanical life doesn't: intuition and individual attachment. Even a Thalan Queen will protect the members of her own brood over those of another. The Yor don't even form those attachments: to them, life is divided between Yor and fleshlings. So they shifted their research focus to individual combat: ground troops, Marine forces, planetary bombardment strategies. And they stumbled across something they didn't expect."

"Teer Kwan?"

"Tir-Quan, actually. Shorter vowels, roll the R, the Q sound is less harsh, more delicate. . . not that you'd probably notice the difference," One said dismissively. "It was apparently a Precursor infantry training system. It's derived from their words for the numbers 'one' and 'one million,' roughly translates to 'one is worth one million.' It's what caused us so much trouble during the Dread Lords incident: their technology was far superior, yes, but it was also Tir-Quan training that gave their ground troops that vicious ten million-to-one kill ratio."

"How does that help us? We don't have doom ray rifles or. . ."

"Irrelevant. The training is mostly mental, learning to anticipate future events before they occur, tapping emotional and physical resources to their utmost, maintaining superior tactical positioning and readjusting tactics within an instant's time," One said. "The first principle of Tir-Quan roughly translates thusly: 'The beam is the extension of the gun, the gun is the extension of the hand/tentacle/claw/pseudopod, the appendage is the extension of the body, the body is an extension of the mind. All combat begins in the mind.' Tir-Quan is just an application of that concept."

"So basically, the Arceans developed a super infantry kung-fu training system. All right. Why didn't it save them?"

"They were too late. By the time they had understood the concept, the Yor were already invading their core worlds," One explained. "So they did what 'proud warrior races' do: they turned over all their information to another species who was also threatened by the Yor. Not the Altarians, who were next on the list for Yor conquest, but the Terrans, who were second on the list, to give them more time to construct and establish the Tir-Quan training center before the Yor arrived."

"It didn't work that way, though. Somehow the Yor figured out the existence of Tir-Quan, and now they want it for themselves. I don't know if they'll be able to adapt it for their own uses, or if they just want to keep it away from the other interstellar races, but the fact that they want it so badly is. . . problematic for us," One concluded. "They want it badly enough that they were willing to set a trap for us to do it."

"A trap?"

"We led the attack on the Hyperion Shrinker, the one that General Warren wanted so badly. It is indeed a Precursor-technology center, but indications are it's only been online for a week or two. Perhaps it was started right after the Yor determined our destination, while we were pushing through their interdiction field." One's eyes were grim and flat. "It's certainly not been online long enough to actually be used. It was bait for a trap, to tempt General Warren into committing his troops to an unbacked ground assault instead of using planetary bombardment, to give the Yor the greatest chance of capturing a Tir-Quan warrior alive and discovering the location of the Tir-Quan center. It was a trap," she repeated, "and we're in it right now."


	8. Chapter 8

**February 25, 2229**  
 **Still in a swamp in the ass-end of the galaxy**  
  
As you can imagine, this was kind of a lot to take in, so I just shut up for a while. We did some more walking, lost some more blood to leeches, finally caught up with Six on a patch of dry land in the middle of the swamp. Big guy had caught a couple of snakes of some sort and was barbecuing them over a little fire. He gave me the biggest one: some kind of backwards apology, maybe.  
  
"So what do we do now?" I asked One, through bites of Lentzlandian Almost Tastes Like Chicken Meat.  
  
"We continue the mission," One said. She ate with small bites, picking the meat off the bone with her fingers instead of biting it off like Six and I were doing. "The invasion is stalled, and the Yor have the upper hand. However, we have an advantage that they don't."  
  
"What is that?"  
  
"I can't tell you about it. I shouldn't even know. But I can say this: the invasion is stalled, but it's not yet lost." She used her snake bones and a couple of rocks to construct a quick map on the ground. "We are here. We used to be there. We need to be here." She jabbed her finger at a round rock to the north of our current position. "The problem is that there are at least ten million Yor between here and there. And about a billion more when we get there."  
  
"All right. . . and what is there?" I asked, chomping on my snake.  
  
"The Capital," One said calmly.  
  
I spit half-aspirated snake into the cooking fire. "The CAPITAL? As in the Civilization Capital?" I gasped, pounding my chest.  
  
"Ex-Civilization Capital, back when the Lentzlandians had it. Now it is just the Colony Capital," One said. She plucked a bit of snake meat from her cheek and tossed it into the fire.  
  
"It's still the most heavily defended area of the planet! There's no way the three of us will be able to take it over!" I shouted.  
  
"We won't have to. Four and Seven will join us there, and Three and Five should already be there. We won't be alone."  
  
"I don't like how all you guys have small numbers," I noted. "Don't any of you guys have numbers like Five Thousand or Seven Million?"  
  
"There are only a couple of hundred Tir-Quan in existence right now," One admitted, "and only a few of them are here on Lentzlandians."  
  
"How many?"  
  
"That's classified, but suffice to say. . . enough."  
  
"Enough." I sighed. "One, even if you guys are worth 'one million soldiers,' you'll need a thousand Tir-Quan to match the forces of just the Capital, and that's not even counting the other cities who are sure to send reinforcements when they see what we're up to. We're not going to make it."  
  
"You misunderstand. We're not trying to win. That's impossible now, with the invasion stalled as badly as it is."  
  
"Then what the hell are we trying to do?" I demanded.  
  
"Complete the mission. That's all," One said calmly. "Sovek Yad Chia."  
  
"Yad Chia Kalia," Six replied.  
  
"What the hell does that mean anyway, some sort of secret password?"  
  
"I think you'd be happier not knowing," One said, "but if you really must know, ask me once the mission is over." She tossed the remnants of her snake into the fire and walked off. "I've got first watch. You two try and get some sleep."  
  
And that's how we decided to march right into the heart of Yor territory with no air support, no fire support, and the ragged remnants of a failed invasion as our only backup.

 


	9. Chapter 9

**February 26, 2229**

This place sucks, I wanna go home.  
  
One and Six took stock of our inventory today. I'm not sure if they were trying to make me depressed, but they succeeded.  
  
Between the three of us, we have:  
  
* One's plasma pistols: both work, and each fires thirty shots before needing recharging. She's got seven reloads. That means, with the one's she's got in the guns right now, about two hundred and twenty-odd rounds of ammunition.  
  
* One's sword. That's right, sword. It's some kind of nanotech: the base configuration is a shortsword eighteen inches in length and one and a half inches wide, but she can switch it to a longsword configuration that increases the length to three feet. She says the edge is made up of hundreds of tiny nano-cutters: think microscopic buzzsaws. Not sure what it runs on, might be solar. One doesn't say. Anyway, I've seen this thing cut through a tree a foot thick with one swipe, and I've seen what it does to Yor, but it's still bringing a knife to a gunfight.  
  
* Six's big gun: KFMG 7000 plasma repeater. And yes, it was taken from a broken-down CATs flivver. That thing is usually crew-served: turret mounted, with a gunner and an assistant gunner feeding them ammo. Six fires it from the hip and he daisy-chained a ridiculous number of ammo boxes together and strapped the whole thing to his back. He got rid of the empties yesterday, and there are five left: that's about five hundred rounds of ammo. At the rate that thing fires, it'll eat through the whole thing in about two and a half minutes of sustained fire, if it doesn't melt first.  
  
* Six's sidearm. Pulse laser pistol, fifty rounds, three extra power packs. He was good enough to loan it to me. One hundred fifty rounds.  
  
* Defensive gear: Six and One have their ninja suits, and while being invisible is great for a while, it doesn't seem to be very protecting. I'm in standard uniform, which is made of ballistic fiber that can stop a 9mm handgun round. That and a nickel will get you a nickel's worth of protection against modern energy weapons.  
  
* Various and sundry knives, grenades, minor explosives, and survival gear.  
  
That's not a lot against one billion angry Yor.  
  
Six and One don't seem to see that, they just nodded and started jabbering in that weird alien language of theirs and making more plans. Me? I sat my ass down on a big log and waited for things to get decided.  
  
Which really freaked me out when someone grabbed me around the neck and pressed a cold steel edge against the back of my neck. "Fos Natha?"  
  
"Fos Sath," One said calmly. She didn't even look up. "Greetings, Four."  
  
"One." The guy let go of me and patted me on the shoulder. "No hard feelings."  
  
"Cripes, aren't there any socially well-adjusted Tir-Quan anywhere?" I complained, rubbing my throat. Then I screamed like a little girl because the guy was a monster from hell.  
  
"What the hell is his problem?" Four sniffed. "Never seen a Jessuin before?" The best way I could describe him is that he was a walking, talking red-skinned frog with bad breath and big eyes. He twirled the hatchet in his left hand and clipped it to the belt of the harness he wore around his waist. "Well, speak up, drigh got your tongue?"  
  
"Lay off him, Four, he's a colonial hick," One said curtly.   
  
"Gee, thanks for the backup," I groused.  
  
They ignored me. "Where's Seven?" One asked.  
  
"Doing her thing off in the swamp, keeping an eye on Three and Five. How about Two and Eight, they around?" The big frog guy sat down on the log next to me, stretching out his webbed feet. Strangely enough, he didn't smell that bad: I thought he'd smell like a frog, kind of wet and damp, but I almost thought I detected a hint of Ralph Lauren cologne.  
  
"Two and Eight are busy leading some prisoners to safety. I've assigned them to rally the survivors and hit the Yor supply lines with quick attacks," One said, holstering one of her guns.  
  
"Guerilla warfare against the Yor, huh? Not gonna be easy."  
  
"Sovek Yad Chia, Yad Chia Kalia." Six grunted, polishing his big gun.  
  
"Speak for yourself, I plan to die in my sleep surrounded by gorgeous females." Four gave me a quizzical look. "Do I have something between my teeth or something, hick-boy?" he asked.  
  
"No, no, it's just. . . I didn't know Tir-Quan included aliens. I thought it was a Terran thing only."  
  
"Hey, I might have three lungs and be biphallic, but I'm as Terran as you are, ape-boy," Four growled. "Took the oath and did my five years, immigrated above the board and everything. Now unless you and me want to step aside and. . ."  
  
"You two stop that," One said. She snapped the firing stud on her other plasma pistol, setting off the spark that could normally ignite the magnetically confined gasses to white-hot temperatures: with the magazine pulled out, it just gave off a big spark and made a cracking noise. "The Alliance is not picky, Lance Corporal Lee," One said curtly. "Tir-Quan candidates were chosen based on suitability for the training regimen, regardless of race, creed, gender, or species for that matter. Loyalty and fighting spirit are valued over such minor considerations."  
  
Four laughed. "Yeah, hick-boy. If you think I'm bad, wait till you meet Three and Five. That'll really blow your mind."  
  
"The way this drop's been going, I wouldn't be surprised if this madhouse included a Drengin and a Dread Lord," I groused.  
  
Four just laughed. "I won't spoil the surprise. Still, you're not curious about what a frog like me is doing in the Terran Alliance Military?"  
  
"I didn't want to ask," I admitted, "I mean, it seems like a sensitive subject and you and I didn't exactly get off on the best foot. . ."  
  
"He happens to be a famous sexual deviant," a low voice purred. I turned around to see. . . well, put it this way, there was no way, unlike One, that I would ever confuse Seven for a guy. At the risk of sounding lascivious. . . okay, there's no way I can talk about her without sounding like a fucking pervert, especially wearing that ninja suit of hers as tight as she did. She wrapped her arms around Four's big, warty neck and gave him a more-than-friendly kiss on the cheek. "Actually caused an emergency meeting of the Jessuins Committee on Public Morals. . . what did they call you, 'the worst threat to the moral fiber of our society since the debauched Emperor Marqual?'"  
  
"That's me, baby," Four grinned, and he planted a big, wet, slimy kiss on Seven that made me cringe.  
  
"You two stop it. We're in the field," One grimaced. "We can't afford to be distracted."  
  
"Oh, lighten up, One," Seven pouted. "Sometimes I think you take 'Yad Chia Kalia' way too literally. Have some fun, enjoy life a little." She turned to me and gave me a wink. "Like what you see?" she purred kittenishly, twisting in a way that. . .  
  
. . .   
  
Anyway.  
  
"Actually, ummm. . ." I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to marshal my scattered neurons. "I'm just a little surprised. I mean, given One and Six, I thought all Tir-Quan would be a bit. . ."  
  
"Uptight?" Four interrupted.  
  
"Frigid?" Seven interjected.  
  
"Antisocial?" Four suggested.  
  
"Boring?" Seven proposed.  
  
"Spartan," I assserted.  
  
"Oh, pshaw," Four laughed. "One and Six are famous for that. We call them the popsicle duo, because they're both cold and they've got sticks up their. . ."  
  
"Lance Corporal Lee," One interrupted. "Let me formally introduce you to Four and Seven, two of the best scout-snipers in the Tir-Quan when they are not being total degenerates. Now that we have all met each other, let's get moving. Three and Five will be waiting for us."  
  
"Awww, you're so cute when you're pissy like that, One," Seven cooed. "You sure you don't want to. . ."  
  
"No!" One snapped, raising her voice for the first time since I'd met her. "Shut up and let's get going." She grabbed her pack and trudged off into the swamp, practically emitting steam from her ears, face red with anger.  
  
"Wow," I mused. "So she does get mad sometimes."  
  
"Only around Seven," Four said. "Darling here has a talent for it."  
  
"She's just so easy," Seven purred. "Always so predictable." Her eyes hardened, and the playfulness left her voice. "Still, she's right. We're running low on time. Let's go."  
  
And so the five of us set off for the biggest, hardest fight of our lives.


	10. Chapter 10

**February 27, 2229**  
 **Finally out of that goddamn swamp**  
  
  
". . . and so the farmer asks, 'Wow, how did you manage to control yourself?' and the last guy goes 'Arwahahwhawhahaaaaa,' because his tongue is all bloody," I concluded.  
  
"HAH!" Four laughed. "That's a good one!" The big frog-man roared in laughter, slapping his partially-webbed hand against his uniformed thigh. "All right, here's a short one. What's better than fnakrakhing a Dreggha against a chain link fence?"  
  
"I dunno, what?" I asked.  
  
"NOTHING!" roared Four, and he started laughing even louder.  
  
"Shut up," One snapped. "Stay tactical, you two are making enough noise to alert every sentry from here to. . ."  
  
"Oh, quit being such a fuddy duddy, One," Seven pouted. She threw her arms around the taciturn soldier's neck and gave her a kiss on the cheek despite her struggling, and the sight of those two female soldiers in such close proximity was wondrous to behold. "We're fine, no one's around."  
  
"We can't be certain of that, we're deep within enemy territory," One said bluntly, breaking the hold and rubbing her cheek with the back of her hand. "We could be ambushed at any minute."  
  
"Awww, don't be such a worrywart, One, live a little," Seven cooed. Then her eyes hardened, and she dropped her airhead Playboy bunny act. "Seriously, we're fine," she said, tapping her earbud. "Intercepted Yor transmissions indicate that the machines are having trouble with a group of "fleshlings" setting up a remarkably effective resistance in the high mountains. They're taking heavy casualties, and in the meantime, fleshling mortar teams are bombarding their research centers from the high mountains. It's driving them absolutely bonkers, or as close to it as a bunch of toaster-heads can get. They've diverted resources to wipe them out there, convinced that it's the last pocket of resistance remaining."  
  
"Two and Eight?"  
  
"Looks like. I'm also hearing reports of two "demon-fleshlings" who are racking up an impressive number of Yor kills. They've put out special directives to eliminate those two on sight. Indications are they got a piece of one of them: 'Target partially disabled' were the words they used in the last report."  
  
"They're good soldiers, they'll do fine," One said curtly. "We can count on them to complete the mission. Yad Chia Kalia."  
  
"I know," Seven said, but her eyes were flat and emotionless, and I realized then that they didn't expect to see Two and Eight again.  
  
"We're here," Six said, putting up his big gun. The two girls nodded and made their way up to the treeline, next to where the big guy was setting up his massive cannon in a nice little dry defile, a few hundred meters from the city outskirts. "Looks quiet. We haven't been detected."  
  
"Of course it's quiet, you wanker, what did you think, Five and I were going to leave you two holding your tallywackers all alone? Unlike you tossers, we complete our bloody missions," someone growled in my ear, and I felt the muzzle of a gun being pressed to the back of my head. "Fos Natha?"  
  
"Fos Soth," One replied. "Hi there, Three."  
  
"Fos Soth. Good to see you again, One." The gun was removed from the back of my head, and I turned around to see. . . nothing. "What the heck?"  
  
"Down here, retard."  
  
I looked down at the source of the noise and my world did another somersault. There was a little rodent there with a bushy tail, wearing a camouflage headband and carrying a plasma pistol power pack on his back, the barrel held in both hands like Six's cannon. "A squirrel. A fuckin' squirrel?"  
  
"Hey, call me a squirrel again, and I'll collect your balls with a rusty knife!" The 'squirrel' drew a bowie knife he had slung across his back like a sword and waved it threateningly in the direction of my crotch with both hands. "Can I eat his balls, One? Please?"  
  
"No, he needs them," One said dismissively. "Where is Five?"  
  
"Where I left him, standing by to cut the power on my mark. We'll have a seventeen minute window to get through the palace security and into the central core. After that. . ." he shrugged. "We do what we do best. Sovek Yad Chia."  
  
"Yad Chia Kalia," One replied emphatically. "All right, so we've got our plan of action once we reach the palace. How about getting to the palace, what is the plan there?"  
  
Three grinned. "Oh, you're going to love this," he cackled, tightening his camouflage headband and sheathing his knife with a fancy little fillip. "Absolutely adore it."  
  
*****  
  
"You know, when we were in that swamp, I never thought I would want to be back in there ever, but this. . . this is worse than the swamp," I groused. "This is. . . this makes the swamp feel like a day in paradise. This makes the swamp feel like an island vacation. This makes the swamp feel like. . ."  
  
"Shut up," One growled, "You're being annoying and untactical."  
  
"Yeah, besides," Seven cooed, "what do you have to complain about? You're packed in a confined space next to a couple of gorgeous girls all covered in mud. There are guys who would pay good money to be in this situation. Or would you rather be in the other truck with Six and Four?"  
  
I shuddered at the thought. The two big guys already took up most of the space in the other truck, and they were practically cheek to jowl in there. If I were in there, with all the jostling around and bumping, I'd probably wind up crushed like a grape in a steam press. "No thanks," I admitted.  
  
Lentz was a mostly wet planet, covered with a lot of wetlands and swamps, and the area around the capital city was no exception. Filters and processing plants and drainage pumps kept the ground from falling apart, but the problem was that the water they were pumping out was filled with organics, silt, and other sludge that built up on the equipment. For that reason, the Lentz had developed a system of trolleys and trains that cleaned and carted away the silt and mud and carried it to other places for use as landfill.  
  
Three's plan was to hitch a ride on one of the trains and hop out when it reached our destination. The silt would help hide our thermal signatures, and the Yor would not be unduly surprised to find organic material in one of these carts. The only danger now was that we could possibly be found by guards doing a search of the carts, but experience had shown that the Yor often didn't have the creativity to think sideways in that manner.  
  
We hoped.  
  
I shifted my weight a bit to try and relieve the pressure on my arm and wound up feeling something soft.

"You know," Seven purred, "if you wanted that so badly, you could have just asked."  
  
"Sorry, sorry," I muttered, knowing my face must be beet red in the darkness. "Didn't mean to do that."  
  
"Don't be sorry," Seven said, and I felt her reach a hand up and fiddle with the zipper of my uniform shirt. "I mean, we've got at least an hour, and although things are a bit cramped, we could. . ."  
  
"Seven, shut up, stay tactical, I'm serious about this," One hissed.  
  
"Oh, I'm sorry, how rude of me, did you want in on this too? We could. . ."  
  
"Shut up!"  
  
"Fine, then, I'll let you go first. I'll even turn around. Be gentle with her Corporal, One here happens to be a virgin as far as I know, and she's as likely to. . ."  
  
 _"NUMBER SEVEN, IF YOU DON'T SHUT THE HELL UP RIGHT NOW I WILL ACCIDENTALLY DISCHARGE MY PLASMA PISTOL RIGHT INTO YOUR HYPERACTIVE LOINS SO HELP ME WISP!"_  One hissed.  
  
"Who the heck uses the word 'loins,' in this day and age? Want me to help you tie up your corset, darling, perhaps. . ."  
  
"Quiet down in there, you stupid bints," Three whispered. The little rodent had his nose poking just above the surface of the truck, the lid opened a tiny crack so he could see outside. "Incoming Yor, stay down."  
  
Everyone shut up. I could hear the pounding of my heart in my ears and the clomping of Yor feet on the pavement outside the slowly clanking train cart. "Please, oh please, don't come this way," Three whispered. "Shit." He dove down from the lip of the truck and dove down into the silt as far as he could.  
  
The clanking got louder and louder, and I heard two steps stop right next to our cart. "Beep VrEeep," a Yor said, and with a loud clunk, the train stopped. There was a loud clang, and I knew that one of the Yor had opened up the lid of one of the other train cars. There was another clang, louder this time, and I knew they were getting closer. Six and One nodded and pressed a button: their ninja suits activated, and the two of them vanished from view.  
  
Too bad I didn't have one.  
  
I tried to sink as low into the sludge as possible. Maybe, if I were lucky, a Yor who opened the cart lid wouldn't see me amongst all the muck.  
  
Oh, who was I kidding. If a Yor opened up the lid, I'd scream like a little girl.  
  
A Yor did open the lid. I did scream like a little girl. About the same time, things started to blow up. The Yor dropped the lid and turned around just in time to see a massive mortar explosion wreck a nearby fountain and hurl a decapitated pissing cherub into its head. The robot stumbled over the edge of the cart and into the mud and muck along with the three of us.

Seven grabbed it by the torso and held it down while One grabbed it by the head, twisted, and pulled. It came off in a shower of sparks and orange hydraulic fluid.

"Three, situation report!" One shouted.  
  
"Some stupid bastard had the same idea we did, and didn't bother telling anyone!" the little rodent shouted. "We've got a battallion of Marines running around like idiots shooting things. . . shit!" Three leaped out of the cart. "They're locking down the palace, go!"  
  
"MOVE YOUR ASSES, TIR-QUAN!" One screamed. She vaulted out of the cart, scattering slime and sludge all over the place, and raced towards the palace entrance, firing both plasma pistols in tandem. "SOVEK YAD CHIA!"  
  
"YAD CHIA KALIA!!!" they roared in reply. I stumbled out of the truck and glanced up in time to see Three unsling his modified plasma pistol from his back and open fire, knocking a couple of Yor back on their asses in the middle of converting from Worker to Hunter-Killer mode: it didn't drop them, but it slowed them down enough for One's guns to finish them off. Seven had found a nice mortar hole somewhere and was picking off Yor with surgical accuracy: boom boom boom, one shot, one kill. Six, meanwhile, was standing in the middle of the square with his cannon going full blast: BADADADADADADADADADADA and Yor Hunter-Killers were falling like wheat under a scythe.  
  
Me?  
  
I was hiding in a hole crying like a baby. I don't remember if I'd pissed my pants, but I remember I was completely out of it. Wasn't going anywhere. Just lay there in that hole holding that laser pistol while things blew up all around me. Don't know why. Maybe it was when that Yor opened up the lid and I saw my death in front of me. Maybe it was relief from being saved. Or maybe I was just a goddamn coward. All I know is, right then and there, I was a basket case.  
  
The shooting stopped. "GO!" One shouted. "Three, get in contact with the Marines, now, tell them NOT to shell the palace, there are friendlies in here. All else, let's GO!"  
  
Six and Seven got up and followed the hollering One into the palace, leaving me behind. I sighed in relief and rested my forehead on my arms. About then I felt a big hand tap me on the shoulder. "Well," Four asked, a huge grin on his face. "You coming, or not?"  
  
"No, I am not coming," I didn't say. "I am staying right here and not racing into certain death with the rest of your madmen."  
  
I didn't say it because just as the words were on my lips, I saw the decapitated head of that cherub statue, and I remembered seeing something like it before. There had been a little girl on the refugee transport who'd lost both her parents. She'd sat there hugging a doll that had lost its head somewhere along the line, not even having the strength to cry, just sitting there and rocking back and forth. Six years old and already with a thousand-yard stare.  
  
I dunno. I guess. . . I'm no hero. But I remembered what that felt like, and hell, I didn't like sitting around and doing nothing while everyone else was fighting and dying.  
  
I stood up and cleared my throat. "I w-w-. . . I was waiting for you, cocksucker," I said.  
  
"Promises promises," Four grinned. He hefted his sniper rifle and slapped me on the back. "Run straight for the palace doors and don't look back," he said. "Wait for it. . . GO!"  
  
I went.  
  
The only thing I remember from that run is seeing a Yor railgun fletchette actually take off the heel of my boot as I ran: the little shard of metal skipped off the pavement and came a couple millimeters from taking off my foot entirely. I hit the ground bad on my next step, tumbled head-over-heels, hit my head against the bottom of the palace steps (thank God, or at least the Terran Alliance Marines Quartermaster, for the Mark VII Standard Issue Helmet.) I managed to stagger up the steps and get inside the door, turned around, started laying down some cover fire with my little laser pistol.  
  
"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE IT!" Four shouted, and I turned just in time to see the big frog barrel right into me and shoulder-check me out of the doorway. A moment later, something big and explosive went off and collapsed the palace doorway. There was a shower of debris and dust, and things went black.  
  
I woke up to find a big Jessuins laying on top of me, shaking his head and spitting out chunks of rock and tooth. "Shit, that hurt," he snarled.  
  
"Why, Four, I didn't know you c-cared," I quipped in a shaky voice.  
  
"Was gonna take you out to dinner and a florgath first, but I guess we don't have time for romance, baby," Four replied.  
  
"Hey, I called dibs on that one!" Seven shouted back, cooly taking the head off of a Yor straggler with her rifle.  
  
"All of you shut up and get tactical now!" One yelled. Her right pistol slide-locked, indicating it was out of ammo, so she threw it away and drew the sword. "GO!" She raced down the hallway, holding a sword and pistol like an old-time cavalry officer, blazing away with her gun.  
  
"Crazy tart's gonna get herself killed," Four complained.  
  
"Then I guess we'd better go rescue her," Seven said.  
  
"Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die," I muttered.  
  
 _"Cannon to right of them,"_  Six recited.  
 _"Cannon to left of them,_  
Cannon in front of them  
Volley'd and thunder'd;  
Storm'd at with shot and shell,  
Boldly they rode and well,  
Into the jaws of Death,  
Into the mouth of hell  
Rode the six hundred."  
  
We all turned to look at Six, who was calmly reloading his cannon. "Last box," he admitted. "I'll have to get a replacement weapon soon.  
  
"We'll tear one off a Hunter Killer for you," Four promised.  
  
"I'll hold you to that. Let's go."  
  
And so we went.  
  
Into the jaws of death.  
  
Into the mouth of hell.


	11. Chapter 11

**March 9, 2229**  
 **TQSC "Carlos Hathcock," Sickbay**  
  
  
I asked One today, "What went wrong?"  
  
She said, "Nothing. We completed the mission."  
  
"Yeah." I said, "but so many people died."  
  
"I know," One said. "That's why they call it war."  
  
"But I still feel like I could have done more. . . that more people could have survived."  
  
"And that," One said, "is why the Yor are going to lose."

 

 ***REWINDING***  
  
 **February 28, 2229**  
 **Lentz City, Former Presidential Palace**  
  
  
Four went down first.  
  
The big frog was bringing up the rear as we raced down the corridor towards our destination. There was a noise behind us. He turned around. The next moment, a Yor railgun round hit him in the gut. The wall behind him turned red, and he fell down like a puppet with its strings cut.  
  
Seven almost lost it. She started screaming something that I later realized was Four's real name, started to run back to pick him up, but the Yor were laying down suppression fire so thick you could walk on it. It took both Six and me grabbing her and holding her down to stop her from running out there into the hail of gunfire. We dragged her between us into the elevator in time to see Four draw his sidearm, put it to his temple, and pull the trigger. His head exploded a split second before the doors closed.  
  
Things were really quiet after that, just us and the hum of the elevator swiftly descending into the ground. Seven had gotten real quiet: she wasn't sobbing, but there were a lot of tears just running down her face, and she was sitting curled up in a ball in the corner. I was looking down at a spot of red on my uniform trousers. It hadn't been there before Four got hit.  
  
"Why did he do that?" I whispered. "He didn't have to do that."  
  
"He did," One said grimly. "After we knew the Yor are trying to find the location of the Tir-Quan, he did."  
  
"Oh."  
  
She glanced down at her wristwatch and nodded. "Ten seconds. Hang on," she said.  
  
"Ten seconds to what?"  
  
And then the lights went out.  
  
There was the soft, shrill humming of a pair of night-vision goggles being activated. "Six."  
  
I heard movement, and then the pitch-darkness was interrupted by a thin ray of light. I saw Six straining to open the massive elevator doors with his bare hands, the big guy reminding me of a Bible School illustration of Samson doing his thing, and then the door slid open with a soft hiss.  
  
Things were very dark, and what lights were on were red. There was a squirrel . . . sorry, Snathi. . . sitting there in the middle of the hallway, but it didn't look much like Three. This one was shorter and slightly burlier, and instead of a camouflage headband, it was wearing a set of miniature infrared snoopers and a computer rig. "Five," One said.  
  
"One." It glanced around at us. "Where is Four?"  
  
"Four didn't make it," Seven said. She'd gotten to her feet again and was rather unsteadily checking over her rifle. "We're all that's left."  
  
"Damn," Five sighed. "I'm sorry."  
  
"Don't be. He did his job. Kali Yad Chia," Seven said bitterly. She unsnapped her 10x sight from the rifle and swapped it out for a 1x reflex red-dot sight.  
  
"You don't believe that. Not really," One said sympathetically.  
  
"Well, I'm sorry, One, I can't be a cold-hearted bitch like you. I've actually got something called emotions, and I'm trying to control them right now, so just leave me the fuck alone before I start breaking down AGAIN," Seven snapped. She threw the 10x sight against the wall, and it shattered, the sensitive optics inside skittering across the floor like spilled birdseed.  
  
Five cleared his little rodent throat. "Look, we're running out of time. My little bit of sabotage with the power circuits won't last long before the auxiliaries kick in, and we've got work to do. I need your help right away, or this plan is going to fall apart."  
  
One nodded. "Then let's get to it."  
  
***  
  
There were a lot of Yor laying around on the floor as we walked through that red-lit corridor: One took a moment to stab each of them in the chest with her sword as we went, but none of them put up any resistance. "What's the matter with them?" I asked.  
  
"Computer virus," Five said. "My own special brew. They adapted to it soon enough, figured out a countermeasure, but before then it fried the central coordinators of a couple thousand drones. Not much, but enough to make this work."  
  
He led us into a chamber three hundred feet high and as big around as half a basketball court. In the center of that chamber, there was a massive spire descending from the ceiling like some monstrous stalactite, mechanical components shifting and turning while strange runic patterns appeared all over its surface. Suspended just under the point of the spire was a sphere, about the size of a large beach ball, slowly turning and occasionally emitting a pulse of white light.  
  
"What is this place?" I wondered.  
  
"This," One said grimly, "is what we came here to find." She nodded to Six, who walked up to the sphere and waited for a signal. Five tapped a control on the tiny keyboard on his left wrist, and with a loud thumping sound, the sphere came free of its repulsor field.   
  
Six caught it easily and hefted it over his shoulder. "It's pretty light," he admitted. "Just big."  
  
"All right. Let's get out of here," One said.  
  
"No good." Seven was kneeling by the door, her sniper rifle out, and in the lurid scarlet light, I could see the grim look on her face. "They're coming down the elevator shaft. In great numbers, too. Whatever you guys just did, they don't like it."  
  
"Are there any other exits?" One asked.  
  
"None. It's a dead end," Five sighed.  
  
"Perhaps literally. . . all right," One said. "Everyone out and get ready for a defensive action. Five, set charges, I want them arranged around the top of the spire in a semi-circle, we need to. . . oh, screw it, Yon Sa Teth For Laine. . ." she started jabbering in that weird language of hers, and the four of them started laying out their plans.  
  
I took a short walk. There were screens up all around the walls of the room, and on one of them, I could see the Yor crawling head-first down the elevator shaft like mechanical spider monkeys from hell. One of them had reached the bottom and was cutting through the roof of the elevator car with a cutting torch. It seemed to be slow going, but he was making progress, and he'd be through within a few minutes.  
  
Something about that bothered me. I looked up at the spire chamber. Three hundred feet tall. The corridor leading to the elevator shaft was about ten, fifteen feet. The hallway at the top of the elevator where Four had died was about six feet and then it turned the corner. "Hey, Five," I asked.  
  
"Do you mind? We're a little busy here," One said.  
  
"Just a quick question. Is this whole facility underground?"  
  
"It used to be a bunker to protect the Lentz leadership, before the Yor took it over. Yes, it is."  
  
"How deep?"  
  
"About five hundred feet," Five said. "What is it?"  
  
"And you shut down the power to keep the Yor from using the elevator, right?"  
  
"Yeah, that's right," Five said. "What of it?"  
  
I glanced at the monitor showing the Yor struggling to cut through the roof of the heavily reinforced elevator car, then thought back to how short the elevator trip down had been, and the plummeting feeling it had made in the pit of my stomach. I looked up at the spire chamber, and thought about how fast an elevator would have to travel to go five hundred feet in a few seconds. Then I grinned.  
  
"Maybe we should turn the power back on."


	12. Chapter 12

**February 28, 2229**   
**Our Final Stand**

"It was a good plan," One said. "It's a shame it didn't work better."

The first part had gone perfectly. Five had restored power to the elevator just as we sent it up at maximum speed. The heavily reinforced elevator car had sped upwards at an insane rate of speed like a bullet through a gun barrel, smashing Yor to bits as it raced upwards through the descending robots.

In my plan, it would have gone all the way to the top and been sent back down again for another run against the reinforcements. We would have been able to use it as a kind of battering ram for two, three shots before it finally broke done from the strain.

What actually happened was that the Yor just started hurling themselves down into the elevator shaft en masse. They smashed to bits by the dozens, but each one was like a rock being thrown into a flivver intake. By the time the elevator was halfway up, the drive wheels were wrecked. It grinded to a halt three-fourths of the way up, and then the Yor leaped down and started cutting through the roof again.

"Six," One had said, and the big guy had run up with a welding torch, closed the lower doors, and burned them shut. "It was a good plan," she'd said to me, "it's a shame it didn't work better."

"It didn't seem to do much of anything," I sighed.

"It bought us a little time. That might be all we can ask for." She turned to the others. "Ammo check."

"Nothing," Five said. "Just my brains and my rig."

"Half a box," Six reported. "Not much, but I'll make it count."

"Half a dozen in the gun, two reloads of ten each," Seven said.

"One clip," I said, "Twenty rounds."

"One round, then, down to knives and teeth," One said. She looked down at her plasma pistol then tossed it to me. "You'll need this. Five. Hand over your rig and get out of here, not much you can do now."

The Snathi ran over and unstrapped a remote from his back, handed it to me and showed me the controls. "This blue one, here, is rigged to a set of explosives arranged around the spire. This red one, here, is rigged to collapse this tunnel. When everyone else is dead, you need to set off the blue one first, then run inside and press the red. That'll slow the Yor down enough that they won't bother following you. By that time, they should have more important things to worry about." He tossed it to me, and I caught it in unsteady hands. "If they do keep coming, use One's plasma pistol to destroy the sphere too. It might help." He ran up the wall and opened up one of the tiny ventilation grilles near the ceiling. "Yad Chia Kalia."

"Yad Chia Kalia," One replied. She gave Five a firm salute. The little Snathi returned the salute gravely and disappeared into the maze of ventilation ducts.

"Wait. . . what more important things? And what do you mean, when we're all dead?" I asked.

"The Yor will never stop coming if they know one of the Tir-Quan is alive down here. You're the only one who has a chance of surviving this battle." One unslung her sword and extended it to its full length, standing there like a samurai from an old movie, her hair rustling in the gentle breeze from the ventilation ducts. "We need you to take the sphere back to Alliance High Command, or failing that, destroy it entirely. Under no circumstances must the Yor be allowed to take it back, or the fleet will be lost."

"The fleet. . ." Things started to click together in my head. "You said this was the key to winning the war."

"The moment Five shut it down and Six removed the sphere from the spire, the Yor interdiction field around the planet went down," One said. She grinned at me fiercely, the smug, satisfied grin of a cat who's just caught a mouse. "The Yor aren't the only ones who can set a trap. We knew they'd want to capture a Tir-Quan so badly they would allow us to entrap ourselves. And so we have. But in the process, we took more of the bait than they ever expected we would. They never thought we'd ever make it far enough to capture the Interdiction Field Generator, and now they're panicking because they've just detected the fleet of Victory-Class cruisers and Lightning Transports that were massing just out of their sensor range, waiting for the signal to strike. In three days, the skies around Lentz are going to be filled with more Terran ships than the Yor have ever seen in their lives, and they will take this planet and show those mechanical freaks what 'fleshlings' can do when they put their minds to it."

There was a loud slam as something big and heavy smashed into the elevator doors. "They won't use guns, not in this close proximity to the Field Generator, and as long as they have a chance of putting it back online and slowing our fleet back down. We're nearly out of ammo, so this is going to come down to hand-to-hand," One said. She turned back to the doorway, priming a grenade. "When it does, you run and hide. You haven't been to the Tir-Quan center yet. You can't dodge bullets."

"Wait, wait, wait!" I shouted. "There has to be another way, you can't just expect. . ."

"Sovek Yad Chia. Yad Chia Kalia." Seven said. She smiled wanly at me, looking up from her rifle. "It's ancient Arcean. It means, 'Your life is all. My life is nothing.' It's what they told us when they first handed over the plans for the Tir-Quan training center. It's about half a truth at best, but it's still a good motto."

I didn't have much to say.

The pounding got louder, and now we could see the faint red glow of the Yor cutting torches could now be seen through the heavy reinforced duranium doors. "Hey, One?" Seven asked. "Considering that we're in deep shit now. . ."

"Do whatever you want," One sighed.

"Mmmm, thanks, sweetie." Seven unzipped her uniform: really really REALLY low, and then she did something very unladylike that, as a gentleman, I feel obligated not to tell you about. "There's nothing like a good firefight to get the blood really pounding," she purred.

"Degenerate harlot," One grimaced.

"Frigid spinster," Seven retorted.

"Whore."

"Bitch."

"They're coming," Six interrupted.

"Mmmm, so am I."

"Shut up."

"Make me."

The doors burst open, and the Yor attacked.


	13. Chapter 13

**February 28, 2229**  
 **Hell**  
  
  
Funny thing was, I didn't have time to be scared. I was too busy fighting like hell.  
  
The Yor burst in like an exploding waterballoon, flooding into the corridor like cockroaches. They were immediately met by a lance of flame from Six's cannon that tore the first wave to shreds, and by sniper rounds from Seven's rifle that blew them to pieces. That didn't last much more than a minute and then it was down to hand to hand.  
  
The Yor couldn't use guns: I was at the end of the corridor crouched over the Interdiction Field Generator Core, blazing away with my largely ineffectual laser pistol until I ran out of ammo, and any stray shot could hit it. They had to fight their way through three Tir-Quan hand-to-hand.  
  
One hundred of them, three of us.  
  
Poor them.  
  
It's hard to describe the way a Tir-Quan fights, but the best way to think of it is, it's like a dance. The three of them moved like one, covering each other's backs, striking out like a whirlwind, each movement was a picture of grace, without wasted motion. They each brought their own aspect to the dance: Six was simply brutal, slamming the Yor back with his useless cannon, at one point picking a Hunter-Killer up by the head and crushing it with his bare hands. One was like a machine, or a wild beast, her body seeming to bend and float, catlike reflexes dodging the enemy's cutting blades by bare millimeters. Seven somehow managed to bring a kind of sultry sensuality to her movements: even while slicing a Yor apart with its own nano-whip, she made it look good.  
  
It couldn't have lasted more than a minute or two, and then One yelled, "First Charge!" and I hit the detonator: not the one that would collapse the tunnel, but one that set off a series of claymore mines in the ceiling tiles. A shower of ball bearings tore through the Yor ranks, halting their attack and clogging up the corridor with their sparking, mangled carcasses. "Grenade Out!" One shouted, and the three of them primed and hurled EMP grenades in unison. There was a loud zish and a flash of white light, and then things got quiet, except for a thin haze of smoke from the dying Yor.  
  
"Status Report!" One shouted. "Green!"  
  
"Yellow," Six muttered. He had an arm clutching a deep gash on his left upper arm, staunching it with a field dressing soaked in coagulant. "I'll be fine."  
  
"I'm good," Seven sighed, and then she slumped to the ground.   
  
One ran over to her. There was a lot of red on the ground under her body and more was coming out every second. "Shit," One growled. "Six, Jar Sulith, Kilik. . ." She stopped in the middle of taking a field dressing out of her belt pack, pressed two fingers to Seven's neck. "Shit shit shit. . . Xaxii Farth!" She emptied her belt pack onto the ground, rummaged through the supplies until she found the automatic defibrillator. She didn't have to open up Seven's uniform, but she did have to wipe away some blood to apply it over her chest. The debfib device made some beeping sounds, and then it started going through its automatic cycle, desperately trying to restart the Tir-Quan's heart with carefully measured electrical pulses. Based on the color of the lights, it didn't seem to be working that well.  
  
"One, Fel Fikkath," Six said. He'd picked up a Yor plasma torch and was jiggering with the trigger mechanism, rigging it up to his wrecked cannon. A quick test burst, and a jet of blue-white flame emitted from the makeshift flamethrower.  
  
"In a minute!" One yelled. "Steve, get the hell up here!"  
  
I ran up to the two girls, trying not to step in the blood. "Shears. Field Dressing. Artificial Blood Analogue. Shock Suppressant. Anesthesia. Use them." One pressed the medical supplies into my hands and took up position next to Six on the wall of Yor corpses, accepting the makeshift flamethrower as the big guy started jury-rigging another weapon. "Hurry!"  
  
I couldn't see much of the battle, aside from One shooting plasma flame from her position on the baricade and Six tearing Yor plasma torches from the hunter killers and jury-rigging them into guns. I was too busy trying to save Seven's life. Cutting away her uniform was hard going: that fabric was surprisingly tough, and it ate up the shears like they were gravel.   
  
I'd just finished rigging up a whole crapload of blood analogue on an IV drip when Seven's eyes fluttered open. "Ouch," she whispered.  
  
"How ya doin', babe?" I quipped nervously.  
  
"F'rgot to duck," Seven sighed. She glanced down at her tattered uniform, saw that I'd cut most of it away. "Like wh y'see?"  
  
She looked like a mess. It physically hurt to see that gorgeous body torn up so badly, and the field dressings made her look like a patchwork horror movie monster. "Couldn't keep my hands off of ya," I joked.  
  
She smiled weakly. "Wait 'ntil 'm feel' bett', an' I'll let you touch it all over." She sighed and closed her eyes, and I nearly panicked, but the defibrillator didn't change color to red and start its sequence, so I figured she was fine. I gave her a shot of shock suppressant, and some anesthetic to keep her unconscious, and carried her into the spire room, out of the way of the firefight.  
  
  
**********  
 **March 9, 2229**  
 **TQSC "Carlos Hathcock"**  
  
  
I asked One if she thought I could have done something differently when I took Seven out of the line of fire.  
  
"There's no way you could have known," One said.  
  
"I should have known. I should have kept a closer eye on the Core. I should have been more careful."  
  
"You did your best. That's all we could have asked for. The rest," One said, "was just bad luck."  
  
  
*********  
 __ **February 28, 2229 (Iteration One)**  
 **Hell**  
  
  
I'd dropped Seven off in a safe corner of the spire room when I heard the clacking sound behind me, and I knew we'd been tricked.  
  
The thing about biological beings is that it's hard to really effectively play dead, because your heart keeps beating and your lungs keep breathing. Yor have no heart and no lungs.  
  
Some of the "corpses" weren't dead after all: they'd been laying there biding their time and waiting for their opportunity, and they saw it when I left the corridor to drag Seven to safety.  
  
One and Six never saw it coming. The Yor hit them from behind and tore them to pieces in an instant, those monomolecular blades cutting through flesh and bone like a steak knife through butter. They didn't even have time to scream.  
  
I knew we were dead. I went for the detonator, but the Yor were faster, and my hand was off at the wrist before I could hit the button. A pair of cutting shears plunged into my chest, and I dropped like a rag doll. Before the world went black, I saw two things. One was the Yor picking up the Core and carrying it over to the spire to turn the Interdiction Field back on. The second was a Yor Drone picking up Seven's unconscious body. I wondered why they didn't finish her off, and then, just before it all went black, one final thought passed through my dying mind.  
  
They'd succeeded in capturing a Tir-Quan alive.  
  
Click.


	14. Chapter 14

**_July 30, 2239_ **   
**_Tir-Quan Training Center, Location Classified_ **

  
_"What was it like the first time you felt the Premonition?" Apprentice Mirris asked today._

_The question set me aback. It has been a long time since I last thought about those events on Lentz 1. It also brought back memories of Liria Mue, whom I first met there on that planet, and whose death I still keenly feel, even on this day one year after her death in the Second Dread Lord Incursion. The Alliance considers her a hero and a martyr, and they lionize her death in single combat against the Dread Lord Heirarch, but to me, dearest Liria was a close friend and boon companion, and I still awake at night sorely missing her presence next to me. In some ways, perhaps that is why I feel such a fondness for Apprentice Mirris, as she reminds me of Liria in spirit, if not appearance._

_That is not to say that I have romantic intentions towards Apprentice Mirris, for that would be frightfully improper._

_Allow me to further clarify that I would not toss Apprentice Mirris out of bed if she came looking for me, for as improper as it is, she is also hot to trot and has the face of an angel and a body made for sin._

_Premonition. It is the core of Tir-Quan training, and the principle that lies at the heart of its effectiveness. Simply put, it says this: time is not an arrow, but a branching stream. If you know what lies ahead, you can change its course. The problem is that knowing what lies ahead requires either sight beyond sight or someone from up ahead telling you what is coming._

_Premonition relies on the latter. Simply put: a sentient mind of sufficient power and will can reach out beyond the three dimensions of space into the fourth of time. A sufficiently strident cry can vibrate in the fourth dimension, and be detected by a willing and properly receptive mind: perhaps that of the same person who first cried out, further back in time. It is why Tir-Quan can dodge bullets, and the principle being studied by the Alliance's "Technological Singularity Project," which seeks to unlock the very secrets of time and space itself._

_"My first time was frightening, to say the least," I told Apprentice Mirris. "It was a difficult situation. One of the first times the Tir-Quan were tested in combat, and a bad situation. It was during the Yor war, before they were pacified, back when they were still a warlike and xenophobic race, not the philosophers and builders you know. My Downstream self encountered a situation that he could not win, one that spelled doom for many millions of other Terrans, and possibly the Alliance itself. His cry was. . . very loud. And very desperate." My eyes were distant. "It was especially desperate because there was one whom he loved and wished to save beyond any other. The cry was. . . it resonated very strongly with me." I closed my eyes, remembering the terror of that moment when I had seen the first iteration of the possible future that lay before, the moment that marked my destiny._

_Apprentice Mirris' eyes are searching. "But it worked, yes? The Cry. It reached back, and you heard the Premonition. Your Downstream self succeeded, yes?"_

_"To an extent. There was. . . a price to pay." The admission opened up old wounds, wounds I had considered closed for many years, since that bloody and terrifying day down in Lentz city. "Time can only be redirected so far, and it has great inertia. He was, to the most extent, successful. But there was a price that was paid." My vision blurs. I turn away. A Tir-Quan Master must shed no tears, and he must not appear weak before his students, after all, so my tears will be shed for me and me alone. I will mourn the loss of that stranger become a dear friend later, on my own time._


	15. Chapter 15

**February 29, 2229 (Iteration Two)**  
 **Our Final Stand**  
  
 _Click._  
  
I'd just finished rigging up a whole crapload of blood analogue on an IV drip when Seven's eyes fluttered open. "Ouch," she whispered.  
  
"How ya doin', babe?" I quipped nervously.  
  
"F'rgot to duck," Seven sighed. She glanced down at her tattered uniform, saw that I'd cut most of it away. "Like wh y'see?"  
  
She looked like a mess. It physically hurt to see that gorgeous body torn up so badly, and the field dressings made her look like a patchwork horror movie monster. "Couldn't keep my hands off of ya," I said.  
  
She smiled weakly. "Wait 'ntil 'm feel' bett', an' I'll let y' t'ch 't all 'vers." She sighed and closed her eyes, and I nearly panicked, but the defibrillator didn't change color to red and start its sequence, so I figured she was fine. I gave her a shot of shock suppressant, and some anesthetic to keep her unconscious, and carried her into the spire room, out of the way of the firefight.  
  
 _ **"TRAP!"**_  
  
I'm not sure how I know that the Yor had set a trap for us. All I knew was that when I grabbed Seven and turned to leave, something made me stop and turn back.

*****  
  
The thing about biological beings is that it's hard to really effectively play dead, because your heart keeps beating and your lungs keep breathing. Yor have no heart and no lungs.  
  
Some of the "corpses" weren't dead after all: they'd been laying there biding their time and waiting for their opportunity, and they saw it when I left the corridor to drag Seven to safety. If they'd waited a moment or two longer, or if I hadn't turned around, they would have killed us all. One and Six would never have seen it coming.  
  
But I did turn around, and they didn't wait.  
  
"BEHIND YOU!" I shouted.   
  
I remembered what One had said. The Yor were machines: sophisticated machines, but still machines. They did repetitive tasks well, but they didn't adapt well to sudden changes in their world view. Biological minds worked by taking prior patterns and quickly adapting them to new circumstancees. Mechanical minds needed to write up new algorithms and properly weight and arrange them in a decision tree.  
  
I also remembered something else she had said: the Yor don't form personal attachments. Only biological beings do.  
  
That saved One's life. A split second of hesitation and Six pushing her out of the way. The Yor Hunter Killer hit him first, and then the big guy went down with a pair of Yor cutting shears in his gut. One screamed and tried to bring her plasma torch around, and then, I kid you not, I saw Six grab the cutting shears in his bare hands, pull them in until they came out his back, reach up, and tear that Hunter Killer's head off with his bare hands.  
  
The EMP grenade was primed before I'd thought to use it, and it was in the air before I thought to throw it. It went off, and the Yor went down, showering sparks from their casings.  
  
One and I ran to Six's side. It didn't look good. He wasn't hit as bad as Seven, but the wound had hit his liver, and it was leaking blood like a sieve. "Shit, shit, shit, Sov Vekka, Sov Vekka," One whispered. She grabbed coagulating field dressings from her belt pouch and started stuffing them into the wound, around the edges of the shears, which she dared not remove. "Sov Vekka, Imari, Salia Vekkio. . ."  
  
"Sei. Orla Teek," Six replied.  
  
One shook her head. "Nei. Nei, nei, Sovek Yad Chia. . ."  
  
"Sovek Yad Chia." Six touched her face and smiled. "Go."  
  
One closed her eyes, and a tear leaked from the corner of her eye and ran down her face. . . just one. Her eyes opened again, and they were once again as hard as flint and as cold as ice. "Corporal," she said softly. "The detonation wires for the charges. You'll have to tear them loose and bring them here."  
  
"But the detonator. . ."  
  
"EMP pulse. It was a good idea, it saved our lives, but now if we want to set off the charges, someone has to do it manually." She took the detonator from me and showed me how the lights would not turn on, the device had been fried by my EMP grenade. "Six just volunteered."  
  
"Wait. . . set it off manually. . . he'll. . ."  
  
"He'll die anyway. He wants this." One closed her eyes again. "Take care of it. I'll handle the spire and the core." She paused, her hands clenching and unclenching, as if wanting to say more, but there was no way she could say what all three of us knew she wanted to say. Finally, she settled for snapping to attention and giving Six the crispest, finest salute she could, her entire body trembling with the emotions she held back.  
  
Six returned the salute weakly. One turned on her heel and left the room, pausing only to pick up the Interdiction Field Generator Core and carry it into the spire room. I pulled the wires from the explosives, jiggered with the safety devices a bit, and stripped the ends off of two wires before handing them to Six. "Just touch these two together. It'll go off right away. Be careful, you don't want to do it too soon."  
  
"Roger." Six gave me a hard look as he held the wires in his trembling hands. "Good luck."  
  
"You too." If this were a movie, this would have been the time for a manly handshake or hug, but there wasn't time for that because we could already hear the Yor coming down the elevator shaft, and besides, Six's hands were filled with live detonator wires, so I settled for patting his shoulder and running away.  
  
One had made a makeshift barricade out of a wrecked door panel and some broken Yor parts, and she'd already dragged Seven and the Core behind it. I ducked behind the slab of reinforced steel just as Six set off the charges.  
  
Things got very loud for a moment, then very dark.  
  
*****  
  
"Steven. Wake up."  
  
I woke up to the feeling of One's fingertips on my face. "We're alive."  
  
"For now." One helped me sit up, and in the dim light of the spire, I could see that the corridor had collapsed. Where Six and the Yor had been, there was nothing but fallen rock and mangled steel, forming a nearly impenetrable barrier. "Six finished his mission," One said softly.  
  
"He did." I shook my head. "Ears are ringing. . . and I keep hearing scratching noises."  
  
"The Yor are burrowing through the wreckage," One admitted. "They started a few minutes ago."  
  
"Damn, these guys don't give up. . . what do we do now?"  
  
One showed me two wires in her hand, the ends stripped off and taped over lightly, so she could pull off the tape with just a tug of her fingertips. "We wait until they break through, and then we set off the spire charges. We destroy the spire, the Core, and ourselves."  
  
"Doesn't sound like a very good plan to me. . . got any that don't involve dying?"  
  
"No," One admitted. "No weapons. No clever tricks. This is all we have left. We can't let them take us alive, and we can't let them take the Core intact. So. . ." She gestured to the spire and the explosives. "Our last stand."  
  
"Maybe we should set it off now. Save some waiting."  
  
"Maybe. Then again, I don't know. We could get lucky," One admitted.  
  
"Lucky. It would take a miracle," I sighed.  
  
"Yes," One said. "But you never know."  
  
We sat there in the darkness listening to the Yor tunnel through the debris, waiting for them to break through so we could give them one last "fuck you" in the form of a huge explosion. "Liria Mue," One said after a long time.  
  
"What?"  
  
"When we first met, you asked me what my name was. Liria Mue," she said.  
  
"That doesn't sound Terran to me," I said cautiously.  
  
"It's not. It's Altarian." She touched the burn scar on her face, and I could see now that it had been deliberately inflicted. "I lied when I said the Arceans went to the Terrans because they wanted to give them time to build the Tir-Quan center. The truth was, they went to my mother first. But my mother didn't believe our race would survive long enough to make use of the Tir-Quan data. So. . ." She made a noncommital gesture. "My safety was part of the deal. Six came with me as my bodyguard. I don't think she expected me to actually undergo the training myself."  
  
"Oh." I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling quietly. "Damn. Isn't anyone in the Tir-Quan human?"  
  
"Well, there is Seven," Liria admitted. "And there's you."  
  
"Me?"  
  
"You react fast enough, and you don't leave companions behind. You've certainly got the courage. All you need is the training. You don't have to say yes."  
  
"I'll think about it," I said, knowing that I'd already made my choice. Or perhaps my choice had already been made for me. Jenkins, Higgins, Four and Six had made the choice for me, and paid my price with their blood. It was the least I could do to honor a debt I could never really repay.  
  
I was interrupted out of such cheerful thoughts by a loud rumbling that shook the room like an earthquake. The scratching noises stopped, replaced by panicked Yor beeping, and then by the sound of Yor footsteps racing away. "What the hell was that?" I exclaimed.  
  
I saw One grin again, that same smug grin she'd had earlier. "That," she said, "was our miracle."


	16. Chapter 16

**March 9, 2229**  
 **Tir-Quan Strike Corvette, TQSC "Carlos Hathcock."**  
  
  
So I had dinner with Three and Five today. They're surprisingly good company for a couple of rodents.  
  
Three was showing me the video that's been going around the nets lately, the one that the news feeds and the politicians have been waving around like a parade banner. It's from the point of view of a soldier on the ground, Major Cecil Sipep's adjutant, documenting the final desperate attack of the Marines on Lentz City.  
  
It starts off with the Marines pinned down by enemy fire. They're low on ammo, and their attack has bogged down, and they've got the grim, resigned looks of men waiting to die and sell their lives dearly.  
  
Then ten thousand things happen at once. First, the coms crackle to life. It's Admiral Westin of Strike Group Valkyrie Blade. "Interdiction Field is down! Good work, boys! Hang on, we're on our way!"  
  
Reports start coming in. General Warren declassifies the existence of Strike Group Valkyrie Blade. On the ground, commanders can see dozens of blue wedges appearing on their strategic screens, with dotted lines showing their plotted course. Three days. Three days and those dozens of blue wedges will be appearing in the skies above our planet.  
  
Then the view shifts, and we hear someone yelling, "Major, it's a goddamn squirrel with a uniform!" Five comes running up, out of breath, his fur scorched and mangled (Three always makes fun of Five at this point, calls him a Snathi barbecue.) He comes bearing the news: a group of Alliance commandos have captured the Interdiction Field Generator, but they're pinned down and they need help.  
  
Things go nuts. Marines start rising up from their foxholes and attacking like madmen. They die, but others keep coming, screaming like banshees, firing their rifles all the way. Major Sipep gets up from his command center and pulls out a pistol. "MOVE it, ladies, they're not paying us by the hour!" There is a brief shot of a Yor Hunter-Killer standing there, confused by the sudden shift in Terran behavior. You can almost see his mechanical brain trying to adjust to the paradigm shift just before a plasma bolt takes his head off.  
  
At this point, the public version of the video skips forward, past about ten minutes of bloody warfare deemed inappropriate for general audiences. The rush has stalled, and the Marines are pinned down again by a Yor heavy weapons nest. Major Sipep is apoplectic. "DAMN it, Marines, MOVE, there are men DYING out there!" he is screaming.  
  
Then the world shakes. Fire rains down from heaven, and everything goes fuzzy.  
  
When the picture comes back, the view centers on one of the most gorgeous sights any mudslogger will ever see: close air support tearing the shit out of the enemy. It's TAS Merrimack, patched together after a couple of emergency repairs in the captured Yor starport. She's battered, she's bruised, she's literally falling apart at the seams (at one point you can see an entire weapons nacelle fall off from the recoil of her own weapons fire) but she's raining down plasma fire into the enemy position, turning the planet's surface to glass. A lucky hit strikes her repulsor systems, and she starts to list and go down. That's when Captain Zhou (Navy Cross, Posthumous) orders the crew to abandon ship. Lifepods race away like shooting stars. A second lucky hit takes out her reactor and she starts spraying coolant like a dying beast.  
  
Everyone runs for cover.  
  
I'm not sure who on the Merrimack managed to hit the emergency reactor core vent, but that's the only reason why anyone who was in Lentz city at the time isn't currently radioactive dust. Instead of exploding, the reactor vented a flame of sun-bright fusion plasma upwards into the atmosphere. The view goes white, then black as the camera struggles to compensate for the sudden flare. Newton's third law comes into effect. The Merrimack slams down like the hammer of God right into the Yor position.  
  
Boom.  
  
When the image returns, things are very dusty and very quiet. There are Marines walking around all over the place, covered in white dust, shell-shocked expressions on their smoke-stained faces. The Lentz palace is gone. Just. . . gone. In its place is a two-hundred meter wide patch of powdered rubble. The Yor are crawling out of the rubble, but they aren't fighting. Too many changes in too short a period of time. Their decision-making software can't hope to compensate.  
  
The rest of the battle isn't so much a fight as it is a slaughter.  
  
*****  
  
I wish I could tell you it all ended happily after that. I especially wish I could tell you that I was able to take Cassandra (you know her as Seven) up on her offer.  
  
That's not to say that she died, but when I brought up the subject by her hospital bed, she just laughed at me. "As much as I'd love that," she purred, giving me that sultry wink of hers, "I'm rather afraid that I prefer to live."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"You don't see it? Liria's staked you out, and that girl doesn't give up a without a fight. Literally. And I'm in no shape to fight an Altarian honor-duel," she said, gesturing to her slowly regenerating legs and body. "Besides, she'll win. You've seen what she can do with that sword of hers."  
  
"That bitch! Who the hell does she thing she is? I'm not a goddamn piece of meat. Doesn't what I want have anything to do with it?" I griped.  
  
"Not at all. Sorry, Steve, I think you're doomed," Cassie teased. Then she went serious, the way she sometimes does. "Seriously, Steven, give her a chance. I know she's not as tasty as I am, and she's as cold as ice and she's got no charm whatsoever, but she's actually really nice if you can get past that prickly outer shell."  
  
"I can't see how I'd ever do that. She's worse than a porcupine."  
  
"If you still feel the same after I get out of this hospital bed, then we'll talk. Or, who knows, maybe you can talk her into something. . . mmm. . . adventurous." She winked at me. "Anyway, you'd better get going. It's almost time for my sponge bath, and there's this male nurse on this ship that's absolutely gorgeous. I'm trying to see if I can get him to give me a really thorough cleaning, if you know what I mean."  
  
I laughed. "You're incorrigible."  
  
"Absolutely." She winked and blew me a kiss. "See you around, Steven. Good luck with Liria."  
  
"I think I'm going to need it."  
  
There's an old Chinese saying: 'Speak of Cao Cao, and Cao Cao arrives.' Liria was standing outside the sickbay when I walked out. "I don't see any lipstick on your collar. Maybe you're not completely degenerate after all," she said.  
  
"It's not on my collar," I quipped.  
  
"Pervert." She turned on her heel and jabbed a finger into my chest. "Unlike some Tir-Quan who will remain unnamed, I expect my partners to have a certain bit of decorum and restraint. So you'll act in a manner more befitting of a soldier from this point forward."  
  
"Partner. . . who the hell decided that I'm YOUR partner?"  
  
"I did. I'm the First, remember? I've got certain rights and privileges. You can, of course, appeal them, but you should know I have a certain weight with them as well. You are the first new recruit for Tir-Quan training in months, and I will be damned if I let the corps degenerate any further than it has."  
  
She walked me all the way to the shuttle ranting about her expectations, basically acting like a mother hen and basically laying out a whole series of expectations for my training and my professional development. It was a relief when I finally got on the shuttle and she left me alone.   
  
I'm on my way to the Tir-Quan center now to start my training. I guess I should be nervous, but honestly, I'm more annoyed. Liria's really starting to get on my nerves, and I can't stand to be around her longer than a few minutes at a time. Cassie's wrong. No way in hell I'll ever get used to that psycho bitch.  
  
Anyway, that's it for now. Tir-Quan training's supposed to be hush hush top secret, so they've told me I can't write down anything about it. Since I won't be doing much of anything else for the next few months, I guess I may as well put this short-lived diary aside.  
  
I guess it's served its purpose, anyway. I'm not just a name, and neither is Jenkins. Heck, maybe he was wrong in the first place. Sure, maybe to the stranger, any individual soldier isn't much more than a number, but maybe he was asking the wrong people. Maybe he should talk to someone like me, someone whose life was directly affected by those men, someone who'll never forget names like Josh Higgins, Jeremiah Jenkins, Ts'chulin'e Jorv'ak, and Orwill Lien.  
  
Someone like me.  
  
  
Steven Yow-Chun Lee  
March 10, 2229  
On my way to Tir-Quan training.


	17. Chapter 17

**February 28, 2231**  
 **TAAT "Battle of Lentz"**  
 **Location Classified**  
  
  
I got a letter from Liria today. She reminded me that it's been two years since that day on Lentz when we all thought it was over. She was also incredibly pissed off. I'm not sure who told her about my tryst with Cassie, but when I find out, I'm going to deliver some pain.  
  
Come to think of it, maybe it was Cassie herself who told her. It's the sort of thing Seven would do. Stir up trouble for the sake of causing trouble. Actually, now that I think about it. . . okay, if I die, I didn't die a natural death, I was the victim of what is looking more and more like a wrong-headed attempt to get a slightly psychotic Altarian amazon soldier girl who has been pining after me for two damn years to get off her ass, swallow her pride, and do something instead of moping around acting all cool and distant about it.

Great. Now I feel all cheap and used. Thanks a lot, Seven.  
  
Anyway, after that I decided to get the hell out of my quarters on the off-chance that One would somehow travel all the way from the Training Center out to the front lines to personally relieve me of my testicles. Officially, I've got no place being on the bridge of a combat vessel, given that I'm a ground pounder, and the Navy is notoriously condescending to us mudfoots. Especially since according to the regs, I'm officially a "civilian advisor," and not supposed to be here in the first place. Still, everyone knows what a black ninja-suit with no insignia means, so people tend to look the other way.  
  
I had another reason, of course. This is the last of the old Terran worlds we're taking back from the Yor, and the first one that was taken: Proxima 7. The bones of Derek and Crystal Lee are down there somewhere, as well as a lot of ghosts from my past. So in a way, it was kind of a religious thing. Put the past to rest.  
  
The planet looks different from orbit. There's not much green left, for one thing: it's mostly Yor construction zones now, and the oceans aren't as blue as they used to be. But it's still home. I've been away for a long time, and coming back feels. . . right somehow. Good and proper.  
  
It's a stunning sight. The Yor fleets are backed up around the orbit of the planet, those fleets of frigates and fighters buzzing like bees around a hive, but that strength is deceptive. In the past ten engagements, the Terran fleet have incurred a fifteen-to-one kill ratio against the Yor: even after they developed point defense systems to counter our missiles, we managed to keep ahead of them by switching over to a new type of energy cannon called the phasor that makes plasma weapons look like child's toys. Nothing stops it: not armor, not point defense. Maybe a sufficiently powerful energy shield could attenuate it, but the Yor don't react that quickly, and they have trouble anticipating our actions. Even if they could develop shielding, the scientists are currently working on something even nastier than the phasor, something that they tried out in ground combat but didn't work because atmosphere attenuates the beam too quickly. No atmosphere in space, so maybe it will work better there.  
  
There have been other developments. The Arceans are back, even though they were never really gone: we gave the surviving nomads the Hatch system as a gesture of thanks for their role in saving all our lives, and they immediately set about doing what proud warrior races do: building up a small but insanely effective fleet of war ships and getting ready to go get themselves gloriously killed in battle. We also loaned them a couple of our best Tir-Quan to help train their soldiers: Three and Five tell me that life with the Arceans is fun, if rather. . . one-dimensional. Or, as Three put it, "These guys seriously need to get laid. If I hear one more song about dying gloriously in battle, I think I'm gonna give some of these booger-faces what they want." Five says he's up to a pack of cigarettes a day, unfiltered.  
  
I don't blame him: despite the fact that the Yor war has turned around, things are looking a bit bleak. Word is that the Drengin are in the middle of a civil war: one of their most powerful clans has broken off from the Empire, and from what I hear, these Korath make your run of the mill Drengin look like Polyanna. We're trying to get the Arceans and the Altarians back on their feet so we don't have to fight a three-front war: it's slow going, but it looks like it might happen. Meanwhile, the Korx have been sucking up to us, mostly because we found out just who leaked the fact that the Arceans had handed over a secret infantry training technique to the Terrans to the Yor, and they're doing some quick spin control to try and avoid experiencing Tir-Quan wrath first-hand. There are rumors that the Drath don't like seeing the Altarians recovering from the Yor attacks, and they might do something to stop that recovery from ever happening. The scariest rumors, though, are those of a small red vessel on the edges of known space that's shown up, blown the living shit out of any fleets it encounters, and then just vanishes into the black.  
  
That's for later. For now, the drop master has called everyone to Ready Two status, and we're getting ready for a drop. I think I'll go check up on the CATs squad, make sure their flivvers are working properly. I destroyed a lot of wrenches throwing them into transmission streams, but it got the message across that my CATs teams, at least, will either drop with fully working flivvers or they will not drop at all.  
  
**********  
**THE END**  
**********


	18. Author's Notes

"Diary of a Terran Soldier" is one of the first stories I ever posted to the internet under the name "themocaw." It was written during breaks and after work over a period of several weeks, and is mostly based on my experiences playing Gal Civ II and conversations with friends and relatives in the military.

When I originally posted this story, I included the following set of author's notes:

*****

 _Author's Notes (i.e. Stuff you probably don't care about)  
  
Thanks for all your support, everyone. Writing this as a serial over a period of a couple of weeks was incredibly fun, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.   
  
A brief history: when I first joined the GCII forums, one of the things I most enjoyed was reading through the AARs, especially Frogboy's own stories about testing out the AI. One of the ones I stumbled across was an older AAR called "The Ship That Won The War," a tribute by a GCII player to the Small and Tiny ships that he fought the first battles of his campaign with. That reminded me of a game when my "Abh Empire" flagship, "Abriel," somehow picked up so many ship upgrade anomalies that when I upgraded it to a combat vessel, it had something like 100+ hit points and could take down entire fleets on its own. I reframed it as a story about the Terran Alliance (who wants to read a story about a custom race based on an anime series, anyway?) and called it "Goodbye to an Old Friend." People seemed to like it. I asked for suggestions. General Homsar suggested a story from a soldier's perspective.  
  
Thus, "Diary of a Terran Soldier."  
  
Some acknowledgements: the story isn't based on any one campaign, mostly the flavor text that crawls by when you first successfully invade a planet. The general plot itself is basically a blatant ripoff of Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" (Johnny Rico/Steve Lee fights a losing battle against the Bugs/Yor, gets picked up by Rasczak's Roughnecks/the Tir-Quan, and comes back to help capture the Brain Bug/Yor Interdiction Field Generator Core in a desperate underground battle), but with more girls. Steve's situation with his flivver is based on my cousin Josh's own experiences with his Humvee before heading off to fight in Iraq: unlike Steve, Josh got a replacement vehicle before he went into combat, and spent most of Operation Steel Curtain quietly (at least, that's my understanding). The poem that Six recites is, of course, "Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Anyone who's read Dune probably knows where the majority of my version of the Tir-Quan's training comes from.  
  
Seven fans can thank Jazmin (not her real name) for Cassandra's survival: the original concept of the ending had Seven dying of her wounds before she could be rescued, with One and Steve the only survivors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Seven turned out to be more popular than I'd anticipated. I was tempted to kill her off anyway (kill your darlings) but when I mentioned this to Jazmin, she told me she hated it when authors killed characters off just to be angsty, so Seven lives to fight and. . . fornicate. . . another day.  
  
Answers to a couple of questions people asked.  
  
  
 **1\. What the heck was up with the block of text in italics? Was it time travel?**  
A. Not quite. Remember that (my version of) Tir-Quan training revolves around anticipating future events. What happened here was that in some alternate timeline (Iteration One), Steve never saw the Yor sneak attack coming and everyone died. In the canon timeline (Iteration Two) Steve felt alternate Steve's anguish at not being able to save his friends and anticipated the trap. Hence, Apprentice Mirris' comment on Premonition.  
  
 **2\. Will you write a novel?**  
A. If I can be bothered to get off my butt and write one, yes. I tend towards short stories, because, honestly, I get bored easily. This is one of the longer pieces I've written, and doing it as a serial was a lot of fun. I'll let you know in the off-topic forum if and when it happens.  
  
 **3\. Will you write a GalCiv novel?**  
A. Don't count on it. This is Brad's_ (Stardock CEO) _setting, Brad's story, Brad's playground, Brad's sandbox, I just showed up with my shovel and a bucket to build a sandcastle. It would be awesome if the devs read this and enjoyed the story, but the story is mostly for the fans who love this game._  
  
 **4\. Will there be a sequel?**  
A. Probably not. But if there is one, it will cover Steve and the Tir-Quan facing down the Korath Clan and the resurgent Dread Lords.  
  
 **4\. Four is a Jessuins? Three and Five are Snathi?**  
A. Immigrants or refugees, obviously.  
  
 **6\. I'm imagining Seven as a sexy blonde Altarian. . .**  
A. By now you know that's not quite right. Seven is Terran. But as for the appearances of the cast: I figure Six looked a lot like the Altarian leader from Dread Lords (I can't remember his name, but he had a blond crew cut.) One looks a lot like Elyse Mue from Dark Avatar, being her daughter (the scar on her face I mentioned at her first appearance is from burning off the traditional tattoos. Three and Five are obviously Chip and Dale. Four is a Jessuins, and weren't you surprised to know what they've got off-screen. Two and Eight no one really saw much of, so they're rather nebulous. As for Seven. . . well, every guy has a different opinion of what is sexy, so just imagine the sexiest woman you can think of and that's her. I know my mental image is a blonde with a great butt. . . anyway.  
  
Final acknowledgements: GalCiv II belongs to Stardock, and so do all the elements from that game included in the story. Thank you, Jazmin, for not being more pissed off that I'm spending so much time writing a video game fanfiction. Thanks for reading this story and enjoying it. It might be a while before I write another AAR given other projects and real life concerns: if and when I do, it will focus on either the influence warfare concept or Technological Victory (probably the latter, there's actually an AAR in here already that does a great job of portraying a culture war between the Iconians and the Terrans. . .)

*****

Wow. How time changes. 

Jazmin is no longer an active factor in my day to day life. I no longer play Galactic Civilizations 2 (although I'm very interested to see what Stardock does with the upcoming sequel, after the disappointment of the **Elemental: War of Magic** series.) I've completely dropped out of the GalCiv 2 fandom. But the story, I think, is still pretty okay.

Hope you had fun reading it.

"Themocaw"


End file.
